Capacity planning is forward-looking resource management that allows a computer system administrator to plan for expected changes of system resource utilization and alter a system to adequately handle such changes. Server performance and capacity planning is a top concern of computer administrators and business managers. If a lack of proactive and continuous capacity planning procedure leads to unexpected unavailability and performance problems, the downtime that results could be financially devastating to a company that depends heavily on server performance, such as an Internet-based merchant.
The importance of superior capacity planning is heightened by the continuous growth in server-dependent companies and potential customers for such companies. Even a solid company that has millions of customers can quickly decline in popularity if it does not increase its resources to handle a constant increase in customers. Excessive downtime of such a company can cause customers to take their business elsewhere.
Capacity planning requires both scientific and intuitive knowledge of a server system. It requires in-depth knowledge of the resource being provided and an adequate understanding of future server traffic. The difficulty of the problem has increased by the development of technology in which multiple servers, or a server cluster, is employed to handle a network or an Internet website.
Current capacity planning methods do not adequately estimate a number of servers having certain resources that a system will need to handle expected loads (number of requests per second). Therefore, a capacity planning method and system is needed in which a user can provide an expected load that the system needs to handle and receive information on how to increase servers and/or resources to adequately handle that load.